Coast Guard officials in South Portland say new system will save lives

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — U.S. Coast Guard officials continued the nationwide rollout of the service’s new Rescue-21 communications system in South Portland on Wednesday, touting the state-of-the-art technology as an upgrade that will save lives.

Using a series of 10 shared and dedicated communications towers up the Maine coast — part of a larger $1 billion nationwide network of 232 such towers — Coast Guard search teams can use digital triangulation to pinpoint the broadcast points of distress calls.

“Rescue-21 adds power by providing lines of bearing from one or more shore-based towers to identify the location of distressed callers using the intersections of those lines,” said Capt. Christopher Roberge, commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector Northern New England, during a ceremony and demonstration Wednesday. “In cases where we can bring Rescue-21 to bear, that means more defined and smaller search areas, which in turn means less time searching before we find what we’re looking for.”

In Maine, the system has been live along most of the coast since 2009. Wednesday’s event marked the service’s official acceptance of the system from contractor General Dynamics Corp. and signified the completion of the northeastern network.

The Rescue-21 system replaces the National Distress and Response System, which Coast Guard representatives said has been used since the 1970s and is based on analog technology dating to the 1950s.

Cmdr. Brian Gilda, deputy commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector Northern New England, told the Bangor Daily News on Wednesday that distress calls previously were located based on which radio tower captured the call. That gave search teams large areas to scour because each tower represented several miles of territory.

Oftentimes, he said, rescuers would have to wait until a family member or co-worker reported a mariner missing before truly having an idea where the troubled boat might be, adding hours to the process.

“Having prosecuted more than 1,000 search and rescue cases myself, I can tell you the old communications systems were unreliable, hit-or-miss, [and] we missed calls and people undoubtedly perished because of our old system,” Westbrook native and Coast Guard Vice Adm. John Currier, deputy commandant for mission support, told attendees Wednesday.

With the Rescue-21 system, Gilda said, a single tower can tie a directional line to where the incoming distress call is being transmitted, and if the call is within range of two of the revamped towers, the intersecting area of the two lines provides search teams with a more precise area to look.

“What does this mean for boaters? Rescue-21 helps take the ‘search’ out of ‘search and rescue’ with its enhanced system reliability and improved geographical coverage,” said Chris Marzilli, president of General Dynamics C4 Systems, during Wednesday’s event.

More exactly locating from where a distress call is coming, added Roberge, also can increase the Coast Guard’s odds of weeding out hoax calls, which he said put rescuers in harm’s way and cost taxpayer dollars. If the system pinpoints a mariner SOS coming from deep inland, Roberge said, search teams more likely can assume it’s coming from a trickster.

Other capabilities of the Rescue-21 system are its digital recording of incoming distress calls for analysis and reporting, Coast Guard officials said.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine — whose remarks at the event continued a busy public appearance schedule in recent days which included stops at a groundbreaking for IDEXX Laboratories in Westbrook, a speech at University of Southern Maine and a tour of Bath Iron Works — said she hopes the federal government’s investment in the Rescue-21 system is a harbinger of future support in Congress and the administration in investing in an upgrade of the Coast Guard’s aging fleet. Collins said many of the service’s cutters are more than 40 years old and are deteriorating badly, noting that engine failures in the ships took nearly 30 percent of the Coast Guard fleet out of commission during the past year.

Collins added that she hopes BIW, a General Dynamics subsidiary and employer of nearly 5,800 Mainers, will be considered to build those new cutters when Congress funds them.